One of Strev’s daily routines is scanning through page after page of listings hoping to snag a good deal on items to resale for a tidy profit. I’ve found that I tend to make a lot more overall from these ventures when I target a large number of “little things” instead of dipping a toe into the waters of speculating on blue and purple gear—it’s too easy to take a bath as the prices plummet. Although this basic strategy isn’t without some risk (Anybody need a few dozen stacks of Cobalt Ore?), I’ve been fairly successful wealth generation overall.
Where does the money go? Since Cataclysm released, I’ve dropped about 9k on various flight speed increases, 23k on leveling trade skills, 2k on a few items to stockpile for resale in a few months and about 6k on various enchantments, enhancements, gems, and frippery… and still have about 21k banked at the moment. For the “big players”, this is a trivial amount I know, but it’s very comfortable for me.
By and large, people with disposable coin tend to drop it on one of four things: vanity pets, vanity steeds, leveling professions and item upgrades. Frankly, I don’t really care too much about pets and mounts. Some of them are ‘nifty’, but not so much that I can justify blowing thousands of gold on one. The professions I want to have I have and at maximum level—maybe. I’ve considered playing around with tailoring or jewelcrafting but neither appeal enough to make a time and coin investment…yet.
That leaves gear. Evening time restrictions have left me unable to dungeon run with the guild as of late and I simply refuse to pug in Cataclysm. This means gear has to come from AH Bind-on-Equips or reputation rewards. As I was browsing the AH, I found a nice set of pants. Stupidly nice pants. 11850 gold nice. Breeches of Mended Nightmares (+512 stamina, +321 intellect, crit and haste and a red gem slot for good measure). Maxdps.com confirmed there’s only a couple of better options for the slot.
For a disturbingly long period of time I stared at the pants and contemplated my options. Should I burn over half of my nest egg on pants? What else is the money good for? I clicked the ‘buy option’. The auctioneer asked for confirmation. I chickened out.
In the end I decided to give it a week and see if the price drops. If it doesn’t, a week or two from now I may deem the money is trivial enough that I can just buy without feeling immediate buyer’s remorse. For now, though… let’s see how I can make that extra capital work for me.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Miner Diversions
Anyth is my hunter that mostly lives amongst mothballs. I take her out of storage generally once a week to run with “Team Lowbie”, although now that they’re pushing through the mid-70s, it seems a somewhat ill-fitting term. She’s mediocre at best, suffering from a horrid lack of decent gear and a recent talent change has left her on the “Power Underwhelming” side of the DPS charts, but at least she isn’t stealing aggro from the tank anymore. Time to make her earn her keep. Although I’ve been very, very successful with making gold with Strev, I’d been pondering a way to diversify my holdings, as it were, and make a little extra scratch with Anyth when I don’t feel like tooling around with Strev.
I’d considered getting her herbalism, but I scratched that plan when I remembered both Myrial and Michaelle have that skill and the last thing they needed was another teammate fighting over nodes. How about mining? As I recollected, mining was a decent enough income producer, so I plunked down a few copper and flew around Elwynn Forest looking for ore.
After ten minutes and six nodes I realized it was going to take a long time to get anywhere productive, so I looked up mining on wow-professions.com and discovered to my joy, I could buy my way into the upper tiers by smelting ores from the AH into bars. With a new-found mission and a thousand gold ‘loan’ from Strev, Anyth shopped her heart out and smelted her way…to about 350. At that point all of her smelting recipes were gray and she’d actually have to mine to increase her mining skill. Heh.
Fortunately, this meant she was “Northrend” ready for ore. I installed the “Gatherer” addon and flew over to Sholazar Basin and went to town. If you’ve never played with this addon, it is godly. It marks on your map places where nodes spawn that you or your guildmates discover. It also can display a transparent overlay on your screen nearby potential nodes and maintains a ‘trail’ of where you’ve just traveled. By the time you’ve made a few circuits of a zone, you have a fairly good map and path to take to hit as many nodes as possible.
I quickly learned than flying at slow speed was going to be a serious pain, so I hit up the Bank of Strev for another 4.5k for Artisan flight. This was a solid investment and I have no buyer’s remorse for once.
Anyth flew around ‘mapping’ out the Basin’s nodes. Each one yielded in addition to ‘stuff’ a little over 3k xp. It was actually possible (if not practical) to level through mining. After a time, I had a pack full of cobalt and saronite and was ready to graduate to Obsidium, one of three new ores from Cataclysm. After making my way to Uldum, I discovered vast and plentiful areas of Elementium, which were far above my skill level to acquire, and instead flew across the length of the continent to Mount Hyjal to find a depressing number of fellow miners scooping up the few nodes I could find. It’ll take a few days to cross that Elementium barrier (particularly since Anyth isn’t an everyday character), but hints of Uldum’s treasures haunt my dreams.
(Note: In 24 hours Anyth’s mining revenues paid back the initial 1k loan. It’ll be a while on the flight money.)
I’d considered getting her herbalism, but I scratched that plan when I remembered both Myrial and Michaelle have that skill and the last thing they needed was another teammate fighting over nodes. How about mining? As I recollected, mining was a decent enough income producer, so I plunked down a few copper and flew around Elwynn Forest looking for ore.
After ten minutes and six nodes I realized it was going to take a long time to get anywhere productive, so I looked up mining on wow-professions.com and discovered to my joy, I could buy my way into the upper tiers by smelting ores from the AH into bars. With a new-found mission and a thousand gold ‘loan’ from Strev, Anyth shopped her heart out and smelted her way…to about 350. At that point all of her smelting recipes were gray and she’d actually have to mine to increase her mining skill. Heh.
Fortunately, this meant she was “Northrend” ready for ore. I installed the “Gatherer” addon and flew over to Sholazar Basin and went to town. If you’ve never played with this addon, it is godly. It marks on your map places where nodes spawn that you or your guildmates discover. It also can display a transparent overlay on your screen nearby potential nodes and maintains a ‘trail’ of where you’ve just traveled. By the time you’ve made a few circuits of a zone, you have a fairly good map and path to take to hit as many nodes as possible.
I quickly learned than flying at slow speed was going to be a serious pain, so I hit up the Bank of Strev for another 4.5k for Artisan flight. This was a solid investment and I have no buyer’s remorse for once.
Anyth flew around ‘mapping’ out the Basin’s nodes. Each one yielded in addition to ‘stuff’ a little over 3k xp. It was actually possible (if not practical) to level through mining. After a time, I had a pack full of cobalt and saronite and was ready to graduate to Obsidium, one of three new ores from Cataclysm. After making my way to Uldum, I discovered vast and plentiful areas of Elementium, which were far above my skill level to acquire, and instead flew across the length of the continent to Mount Hyjal to find a depressing number of fellow miners scooping up the few nodes I could find. It’ll take a few days to cross that Elementium barrier (particularly since Anyth isn’t an everyday character), but hints of Uldum’s treasures haunt my dreams.
(Note: In 24 hours Anyth’s mining revenues paid back the initial 1k loan. It’ll be a while on the flight money.)
Monday, December 27, 2010
Blackrock Caverns Strategy
Ok, I’ve put this off long enough. Today we delve inside Blackrock Caverns (BRC), which is so pleasantly oldschool I thought it was a revamped classic dungeon I’d missed somehow. The dungeon itself is a new wing of Blackrock Mountain and is conveniently located near the northern entrance. For those of you who just wiped, Googled, and found this: from the spirit go up, across the chain, hop down just before you get to the end, run a little east, take the north passage by the summon stone and it’s the first passage to the east. Inside is a network of caves and tunnels mixing with dwarven architecture, lending the whole a very ‘dungeon dive’ atmosphere.
The population is mostly orcs, ogres, twilight hammer, with elementals thrown in for flavor. Mages: nearly everything here has at least one sheepable target in a trash pull and there are plenty of corners to duck around if you need to save that invis cooldown.
Very close to the entrance you’ll find the first boss—a huge ass ogre named Rom’ogg Bonecrusher, who has been responsible for more wipes for me in this dungeon than any other (so far). He’s a tank and spank that summons a constant stream of adds that must be gunned down and he has two “gotchas”. The first is a ‘quake’ attack that does massive damage to people who don’t get out of the fire fast enough. The second is the one that wipes groups: he pulls the entire group next to him with “chains of woe” as he begins casting a point-blank-area-of-effect “I kill you” spell. You must target the chains, kill them, and get the hell out of dodge before the spell completes. This can be very difficult with a large number of adds still up and I highly recommend having people make targeting macros (/target chain) beforehand.
The next boss is Corla, some evil twilight sorceress chick, who would probably die for her master a thousand times. Fortunately, once is enough for me. This one requires a little team coordination. In front of her are three servants being smacked with beams of EVIL energy. The three beams must be blocked (usually by your DPS group) while the tank tanks. Players standing in the beam get a fast and constantly ticking counter. If it reaches 100, you get mind-controlled and the party wipes. If you don’t stand in the beam, the servants evolve into OMGITSKILLINGME nightmares from beyond and the party wipes. Also, Corla will cast a number of spells that should be countered at every opportunity. The proper way to handle the beams is to block them until your debuff stack reaches “80”, step out of the beam until the debuff expires, then hustle back into the beam to repeat the cycle. With her spells countered and nothing evolving this becomes an easy encounter.
Karsh Steelbender is a fairly interesting fight with a golemy-elementally-type thing. It takes place on a large bullseye with a pillar of flame in the middle, a “safe” ring, a grated ring that can spout giant gouts of flame, and the rest of the room. After clearing all of the trash in the room, the tank will run in to engage the construct. Karsh starts out practically immune to damage but as he’s dragged through the pillar in the middle he gains a stackable large buff to damage and debuff to defense. In a way, this fight isn’t so much a DPS race as it is a balancing act for the tank.
The next boss is entirely optional: it’s a huge ass corehound named “Beauty” and has three miniboss pups that join the fight. Do not under any circumstances kill ‘Runty’ as it will send Beauty into an enrage frenzy. Otherwise, treat this like a dragon fight: tank should turn things away from the party and everyone should stay out of the fire. Kill the adds first.
Finally, there’s Lord Obsidius. This fight is vaguely reminiscent of the Blood Council in ICC. The boss has two ‘shadows’ that can’t be killed or CC’d (except slowing effects), but can certainly dish out damage. They must be kited away from the tank by two DPSers while working on the boss. Periodically the boss will ‘trade places’ with one of the shadows and that shadow’s kiter needs to pick up the tank’s previous target.
All in all, it’s a great dungeon to cut teeth on. The non-heroic version targets levels 78-82 or so and drops level 308 (I think) blue gear—a nice way to start upgrading from LK purples.
The population is mostly orcs, ogres, twilight hammer, with elementals thrown in for flavor. Mages: nearly everything here has at least one sheepable target in a trash pull and there are plenty of corners to duck around if you need to save that invis cooldown.
Very close to the entrance you’ll find the first boss—a huge ass ogre named Rom’ogg Bonecrusher, who has been responsible for more wipes for me in this dungeon than any other (so far). He’s a tank and spank that summons a constant stream of adds that must be gunned down and he has two “gotchas”. The first is a ‘quake’ attack that does massive damage to people who don’t get out of the fire fast enough. The second is the one that wipes groups: he pulls the entire group next to him with “chains of woe” as he begins casting a point-blank-area-of-effect “I kill you” spell. You must target the chains, kill them, and get the hell out of dodge before the spell completes. This can be very difficult with a large number of adds still up and I highly recommend having people make targeting macros (/target chain) beforehand.
The next boss is Corla, some evil twilight sorceress chick, who would probably die for her master a thousand times. Fortunately, once is enough for me. This one requires a little team coordination. In front of her are three servants being smacked with beams of EVIL energy. The three beams must be blocked (usually by your DPS group) while the tank tanks. Players standing in the beam get a fast and constantly ticking counter. If it reaches 100, you get mind-controlled and the party wipes. If you don’t stand in the beam, the servants evolve into OMGITSKILLINGME nightmares from beyond and the party wipes. Also, Corla will cast a number of spells that should be countered at every opportunity. The proper way to handle the beams is to block them until your debuff stack reaches “80”, step out of the beam until the debuff expires, then hustle back into the beam to repeat the cycle. With her spells countered and nothing evolving this becomes an easy encounter.
Karsh Steelbender is a fairly interesting fight with a golemy-elementally-type thing. It takes place on a large bullseye with a pillar of flame in the middle, a “safe” ring, a grated ring that can spout giant gouts of flame, and the rest of the room. After clearing all of the trash in the room, the tank will run in to engage the construct. Karsh starts out practically immune to damage but as he’s dragged through the pillar in the middle he gains a stackable large buff to damage and debuff to defense. In a way, this fight isn’t so much a DPS race as it is a balancing act for the tank.
The next boss is entirely optional: it’s a huge ass corehound named “Beauty” and has three miniboss pups that join the fight. Do not under any circumstances kill ‘Runty’ as it will send Beauty into an enrage frenzy. Otherwise, treat this like a dragon fight: tank should turn things away from the party and everyone should stay out of the fire. Kill the adds first.
Finally, there’s Lord Obsidius. This fight is vaguely reminiscent of the Blood Council in ICC. The boss has two ‘shadows’ that can’t be killed or CC’d (except slowing effects), but can certainly dish out damage. They must be kited away from the tank by two DPSers while working on the boss. Periodically the boss will ‘trade places’ with one of the shadows and that shadow’s kiter needs to pick up the tank’s previous target.
All in all, it’s a great dungeon to cut teeth on. The non-heroic version targets levels 78-82 or so and drops level 308 (I think) blue gear—a nice way to start upgrading from LK purples.
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Worgen in a Winter Wonderland
As snow fell outside on Christmas for the first time in Atlanta since the 1800s, I sat around idly sipping something warm and wondering what to do. I’d completed my dailies and there was time to kill, so I bit the silver bullet and rolled up a worgen. In moments, Onsunshine stood in the streets of Gilnaes, ready to lend a paw in the battle to save the city.
Over the course of a few hours I slogged through the starter zone. For me the zone was very much “Aliens Vs. Predator”…. 15 minutes of awesome surrounded by two and a half hours of suck.
I’ll give full credit where it’s due: some of the quests were downright engaging and entertaining. “Grandma’s House” was decorated amusingly with portraits of presumably grandchildren on the mantle. Gazing upon the aftermath of Deathwing’s assault brought a long and thoughtful look. The atmosphere was sound and the story of a quasi-Victorian city under siege and the plight, fight, and flight of the survivors moved briskly. So why did I hate it?
Ian noted that I disliked the area because it was gloomy and depressing. Although I dismissed the comment out of hand at the time, it likely factored in to a small degree. Although it was appropriate for the setting, I don’t play games to feel depressed. Just sayin’. My biggest gripe has to be the sheer volume of killtenrats quests. Although I’m generally ok with them, I realized that, for the most part, most of my playtime had been devoured just doing one right after the other. Generally, everything that wasn’t a killtenrats was completed in ninety seconds or less (“grab a book from the shed next to me”, “talk to the person standing over there”, and so forth.) so a vastly disproportionate period of time was spent doing the ‘non-fun’ grind. To top things off, the quest line is so linear it may as well be on a railroad track. Not only should you kill the ten rats, you MUST to do anything else on the island and since you’re walled off from the ‘real’ world in a starter instance, you don’t have the option of doing anything else.
When I finally left the isle, Onsunshine was level 13 and I’m enjoying the druid mechanics immensely.
Over the course of a few hours I slogged through the starter zone. For me the zone was very much “Aliens Vs. Predator”…. 15 minutes of awesome surrounded by two and a half hours of suck.
I’ll give full credit where it’s due: some of the quests were downright engaging and entertaining. “Grandma’s House” was decorated amusingly with portraits of presumably grandchildren on the mantle. Gazing upon the aftermath of Deathwing’s assault brought a long and thoughtful look. The atmosphere was sound and the story of a quasi-Victorian city under siege and the plight, fight, and flight of the survivors moved briskly. So why did I hate it?
Ian noted that I disliked the area because it was gloomy and depressing. Although I dismissed the comment out of hand at the time, it likely factored in to a small degree. Although it was appropriate for the setting, I don’t play games to feel depressed. Just sayin’. My biggest gripe has to be the sheer volume of killtenrats quests. Although I’m generally ok with them, I realized that, for the most part, most of my playtime had been devoured just doing one right after the other. Generally, everything that wasn’t a killtenrats was completed in ninety seconds or less (“grab a book from the shed next to me”, “talk to the person standing over there”, and so forth.) so a vastly disproportionate period of time was spent doing the ‘non-fun’ grind. To top things off, the quest line is so linear it may as well be on a railroad track. Not only should you kill the ten rats, you MUST to do anything else on the island and since you’re walled off from the ‘real’ world in a starter instance, you don’t have the option of doing anything else.
When I finally left the isle, Onsunshine was level 13 and I’m enjoying the druid mechanics immensely.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Grim Batol, revisited
A couple of days after my epic failure to secure epics, the opportunity presented itself to run a random with one of our guild tanks. I gamely joined in, as did one of our resident hunters and the rolling random die put us in Grim Batol. I'd been itching to get some of my own back so it was with glee that I delved once more into the depths...
Grim Batol is an ancient dwarven fortress, now gone to ruin. It is home to numerous dark iron dwarves, minions of the Twilight Hammer, and dragonkin a-plenty. The bridges connecting areas have crumbled and rubble blocks other passageways. Visually, it's an incredibly interesting zone.
After clearing the first few groups of trash, you encounter a number of red dragons that have been netted. Free them and you get to play a mini-game of "make the next hour of your life easier". Seriously, you fly on the dragon as it takes you on an aerial path all the way to the end boss and back. While airborne, you can (and should) use the dragon's flame breath liberally to soften up as many groups of foes as you can. Killing them outright is a bonus, but will take several strikes. You only get once chance at this, so make those shots count. The mobs that have been wounded by the party's initial assault will not heal those wounds.
Upon dropping you back off, the fun begins in earnest and having a mage (even a short, ill-tempered one with a penchant for fishing and puns) is very helpful for sheep pulling and general control. Although mages can't sheep the dragonkin, almost all of the trash packs contain at least one humanoid caster.
The first boss encountered is General Umbriss and, for ranged, he isn't that complex. Shoot, shoot, shoot...when it looks like he's going to charge you, get the hell out of the way. Veterans of Trial of the Crusader will recognize the "charge mechanic" from Icehowl. Otherwise the tank is the one taking the brunt of this one, with a heavy bleed stack and a mana-intensive healer fight. Who am I kidding-- ALL of the bosses are mana-intensive fights! :)
You'll work your way through the 'streets', which are reminiscent of Ironforge cleaning trash until you get to the next challenge: the Forgemaster. This guy sucks.
He's a huge ettin that causes cave-ins that need to be avoided ("get out of the fire, get out of the fire") and will periodically choose a weapon and get powers and abilities that tie in. Swords = tank had better blow cooldowns, because he's about to get barraged with OMG damage, Mace = slow but needs to be kited and he'll impale a party member and carry him around a bit (as the victim takes 9k damage a second), and a Shield. My first encounter with him was on heroic, where the strategy guides simply said "If he grabs his shield first", just reset the encounter and try again. Shield gives him effectively invulnerability from the front...which isn't so bad. On heroic, it ALSO comes with a 180 degree frontal cone of fire doing 18k damage a second that reaches the ranged party members. Suffice it to say there's an awful lot of running. Fortunately, when you wipe on this guy, those dragons at the start of the instance will drop you off very close to him for the next try.
We had the utter misfortune of getting a bad healer in our regular run and had, by this point, wiped a couple of times to the first boss and a couple of times before the forgemaster fell. Heck, when we finally killed the guy, the only ones still standing were myself and another DPS. When we wiped against an easy trash pull, the healer dropped in shame seconds before the tank called him out on it. Fortunately, we were able to pick up a guild healer quickly and after Giggitygoo joined us, things ran a -lot- smoother.
The next boss is optional as you can scootch around him without drawing aggro if you're in a hurry just to finish, but we weren't in the mood to pass up on more loot.
With a quarter of the health of the other bosses, Drahga Shadowburner looks like a wimp. Nothing could be further from the truth. Throughout the fight, he summons fire elemental adds that 'lock' onto a random player if the add gets to the player, there is a massive aoe explosion. (On the heroic run, I got nailed by one for 150k damage.) It is imperative these guys go down fast. When the boss gets low on health, he jumps off a ledge, only to be caught by his dragon ally and from the dragon's back he continues his assault. Now you've got to burn down the dragon's health.
Mr. Dragon is a little different from most dragons: he has a 180 degree cone attack, drops patches of BAD on the floor, but doesn't get a tail swipe. To top it off, Drahga continues to summon his bomb minions throughout this phase. Once the dragon is down, you have to finish off Drahga's last few health before claiming victory.
Only a little trash remains before reaching the big bad: Erudax. This guy is definitely raid-worthy. His main 'specials' include 'Shadow Gale' which roots one person and makes the entire floor except for one small spot around the rooted person a Death Trap. He'll knock the tank around for 60k, then slap a debuff on him to increase damage horrifically, so the tank must kite while the healer run heals with him. On top of this, there are adds to contend with that MUST be taken down when they appear. Otherwise, they hatch black dragon eggs that litter the room and the party goes into a world of hurt quickly.
When Erudax fell, I cheered at the monitor. It's good practice for the heroic and I feel a lot more confident about it now.
The RNG hated me for the run-- everything that dropped was chain, leather, or plate. Honestly, I wasn't broken up about it. At the time the only things I needed that were level i333 were trinkets and a wand.
Perhaps some other day.
Grim Batol is an ancient dwarven fortress, now gone to ruin. It is home to numerous dark iron dwarves, minions of the Twilight Hammer, and dragonkin a-plenty. The bridges connecting areas have crumbled and rubble blocks other passageways. Visually, it's an incredibly interesting zone.
After clearing the first few groups of trash, you encounter a number of red dragons that have been netted. Free them and you get to play a mini-game of "make the next hour of your life easier". Seriously, you fly on the dragon as it takes you on an aerial path all the way to the end boss and back. While airborne, you can (and should) use the dragon's flame breath liberally to soften up as many groups of foes as you can. Killing them outright is a bonus, but will take several strikes. You only get once chance at this, so make those shots count. The mobs that have been wounded by the party's initial assault will not heal those wounds.
Upon dropping you back off, the fun begins in earnest and having a mage (even a short, ill-tempered one with a penchant for fishing and puns) is very helpful for sheep pulling and general control. Although mages can't sheep the dragonkin, almost all of the trash packs contain at least one humanoid caster.
The first boss encountered is General Umbriss and, for ranged, he isn't that complex. Shoot, shoot, shoot...when it looks like he's going to charge you, get the hell out of the way. Veterans of Trial of the Crusader will recognize the "charge mechanic" from Icehowl. Otherwise the tank is the one taking the brunt of this one, with a heavy bleed stack and a mana-intensive healer fight. Who am I kidding-- ALL of the bosses are mana-intensive fights! :)
You'll work your way through the 'streets', which are reminiscent of Ironforge cleaning trash until you get to the next challenge: the Forgemaster. This guy sucks.
He's a huge ettin that causes cave-ins that need to be avoided ("get out of the fire, get out of the fire") and will periodically choose a weapon and get powers and abilities that tie in. Swords = tank had better blow cooldowns, because he's about to get barraged with OMG damage, Mace = slow but needs to be kited and he'll impale a party member and carry him around a bit (as the victim takes 9k damage a second), and a Shield. My first encounter with him was on heroic, where the strategy guides simply said "If he grabs his shield first", just reset the encounter and try again. Shield gives him effectively invulnerability from the front...which isn't so bad. On heroic, it ALSO comes with a 180 degree frontal cone of fire doing 18k damage a second that reaches the ranged party members. Suffice it to say there's an awful lot of running. Fortunately, when you wipe on this guy, those dragons at the start of the instance will drop you off very close to him for the next try.
We had the utter misfortune of getting a bad healer in our regular run and had, by this point, wiped a couple of times to the first boss and a couple of times before the forgemaster fell. Heck, when we finally killed the guy, the only ones still standing were myself and another DPS. When we wiped against an easy trash pull, the healer dropped in shame seconds before the tank called him out on it. Fortunately, we were able to pick up a guild healer quickly and after Giggitygoo joined us, things ran a -lot- smoother.
The next boss is optional as you can scootch around him without drawing aggro if you're in a hurry just to finish, but we weren't in the mood to pass up on more loot.
With a quarter of the health of the other bosses, Drahga Shadowburner looks like a wimp. Nothing could be further from the truth. Throughout the fight, he summons fire elemental adds that 'lock' onto a random player if the add gets to the player, there is a massive aoe explosion. (On the heroic run, I got nailed by one for 150k damage.) It is imperative these guys go down fast. When the boss gets low on health, he jumps off a ledge, only to be caught by his dragon ally and from the dragon's back he continues his assault. Now you've got to burn down the dragon's health.
Mr. Dragon is a little different from most dragons: he has a 180 degree cone attack, drops patches of BAD on the floor, but doesn't get a tail swipe. To top it off, Drahga continues to summon his bomb minions throughout this phase. Once the dragon is down, you have to finish off Drahga's last few health before claiming victory.
Only a little trash remains before reaching the big bad: Erudax. This guy is definitely raid-worthy. His main 'specials' include 'Shadow Gale' which roots one person and makes the entire floor except for one small spot around the rooted person a Death Trap. He'll knock the tank around for 60k, then slap a debuff on him to increase damage horrifically, so the tank must kite while the healer run heals with him. On top of this, there are adds to contend with that MUST be taken down when they appear. Otherwise, they hatch black dragon eggs that litter the room and the party goes into a world of hurt quickly.
When Erudax fell, I cheered at the monitor. It's good practice for the heroic and I feel a lot more confident about it now.
The RNG hated me for the run-- everything that dropped was chain, leather, or plate. Honestly, I wasn't broken up about it. At the time the only things I needed that were level i333 were trinkets and a wand.
Perhaps some other day.
Monday, December 20, 2010
The Heroic
Over the weekend, I attained a number of personal goals:
- I FINALLY finished Loremaster.
- Brian helped me score a red winter hat after I untterly failed to solo Grand Mage Telestra four times.
- Ground first aid to 525 and fishing to 500
- Bought Master flight because I was sick of flying around to arch digs slower than max.
- Ground faction to Revered w/ a couple of factions for the gear
- Finished ALL of the Winter Veil achieves I can before Christmas
By the time all was said and done, I was sitting smartly at around item level 331 without ever setting foot in a heroic and itching to try them out.
The way Blizzard has laid out loot progression for 'new 85's' is as follows: You must have average item level 329 to queue for heroics. All dungeons except the "last three" (Grim Batol, Halls of Origination, and Lost City of the Tol'vir) give loot that is level 312 or less. To get level 333 loot, you must camp those three dungeons repeatedly, finish a few rare quest lines that reward that level gear, or pick up gear from the various factions' Quartermasters once you have an honored reputation with them.
Beyond that, one must either purchase i346 gear with Justice Points earned from doing regular dungeons, get really good at some tradeskills, OR pick up faction rewards from the various quartermasters. Quartermaster gear is level 346 and 359 for revered and exalted respectively. A couple of factions have no daily quests to earn reputation and those that do have very little to pick from, leading to an extensive reputation grind, that's mitigated at least a little by wearing one of their tabards while fighting... in the same last three dungeons.
At the time, I thought reputation was only gathered in dungeons on Heroic level, since I'd been diligently wearing tabards and earning no rewards for helping guildies through Blackrock Caverns and the Throne of Tides many times. When the guild got a group together for Grim Batol, I jumped at the chance to earn "real gear". Hoo boy.
I'll save the run down of the dungeon for tomorrow's post, but I will say this: I went in with i331 average and it wasn't enough by far. To call these 'Heroics' is a joke, a cruel jape by the designers. These are five-man RAIDS and bringing anything less than a raid attitude to it and five skilled, geared players will result in wipe after wipe. I knew it wasn't going to be WotLK's easy 15-minute speed runs. I was not prepared for a two-and-a-half hour strap-yourself-in-this-will-be-hell run that culminated in no less than 16 party wipes with the last two bosses unfinished.
Mind you, this is with my guild group... on Teamspeak to coordinate... many of whom earned the Kingslayer title before it went into 'easy mode'.
After we disbanded, I studied my gear hard and started to work...
The gear I had was 'decent', but I had prepared for a Heroic... not a raid. It was time to change my mindset and put my game face on. I started by enchanting every single piece of my gear. I'd been lax because mats are pricey and I was rather under the misbegotten impression I wouldn't need enchants on gear I'd be replacing soon. Bwahahaha, joke was on me.
Fortunately, my reputation was really close to revered for a couple of groups, so I ran dailies for a couple of days to push me over the line and picked up a couple of nice gear upgrades. A couple of days later, I did the same with two other factions and repeated the process. I'm now at i336 with about 700 spellpower above that first fateful run and am just about ready to try it again.
I had the pleasure of running Grim Batol on regular mode, so I could see how it was supposed to go down. I'll go over that next time...
- I FINALLY finished Loremaster.
- Brian helped me score a red winter hat after I untterly failed to solo Grand Mage Telestra four times.
- Ground first aid to 525 and fishing to 500
- Bought Master flight because I was sick of flying around to arch digs slower than max.
- Ground faction to Revered w/ a couple of factions for the gear
- Finished ALL of the Winter Veil achieves I can before Christmas
By the time all was said and done, I was sitting smartly at around item level 331 without ever setting foot in a heroic and itching to try them out.
The way Blizzard has laid out loot progression for 'new 85's' is as follows: You must have average item level 329 to queue for heroics. All dungeons except the "last three" (Grim Batol, Halls of Origination, and Lost City of the Tol'vir) give loot that is level 312 or less. To get level 333 loot, you must camp those three dungeons repeatedly, finish a few rare quest lines that reward that level gear, or pick up gear from the various factions' Quartermasters once you have an honored reputation with them.
Beyond that, one must either purchase i346 gear with Justice Points earned from doing regular dungeons, get really good at some tradeskills, OR pick up faction rewards from the various quartermasters. Quartermaster gear is level 346 and 359 for revered and exalted respectively. A couple of factions have no daily quests to earn reputation and those that do have very little to pick from, leading to an extensive reputation grind, that's mitigated at least a little by wearing one of their tabards while fighting... in the same last three dungeons.
At the time, I thought reputation was only gathered in dungeons on Heroic level, since I'd been diligently wearing tabards and earning no rewards for helping guildies through Blackrock Caverns and the Throne of Tides many times. When the guild got a group together for Grim Batol, I jumped at the chance to earn "real gear". Hoo boy.
I'll save the run down of the dungeon for tomorrow's post, but I will say this: I went in with i331 average and it wasn't enough by far. To call these 'Heroics' is a joke, a cruel jape by the designers. These are five-man RAIDS and bringing anything less than a raid attitude to it and five skilled, geared players will result in wipe after wipe. I knew it wasn't going to be WotLK's easy 15-minute speed runs. I was not prepared for a two-and-a-half hour strap-yourself-in-this-will-be-hell run that culminated in no less than 16 party wipes with the last two bosses unfinished.
Mind you, this is with my guild group... on Teamspeak to coordinate... many of whom earned the Kingslayer title before it went into 'easy mode'.
After we disbanded, I studied my gear hard and started to work...
The gear I had was 'decent', but I had prepared for a Heroic... not a raid. It was time to change my mindset and put my game face on. I started by enchanting every single piece of my gear. I'd been lax because mats are pricey and I was rather under the misbegotten impression I wouldn't need enchants on gear I'd be replacing soon. Bwahahaha, joke was on me.
Fortunately, my reputation was really close to revered for a couple of groups, so I ran dailies for a couple of days to push me over the line and picked up a couple of nice gear upgrades. A couple of days later, I did the same with two other factions and repeated the process. I'm now at i336 with about 700 spellpower above that first fateful run and am just about ready to try it again.
I had the pleasure of running Grim Batol on regular mode, so I could see how it was supposed to go down. I'll go over that next time...
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Cataclysm Edition Part 3: Dungeon Diving
One of my earlier priorities in the expansion should have been finding the entrances to all of the new instances to enable queuing for them. Honestly, none of them were terribly hard to find, but general laziness kept me from hitting them up until the second time I had to be summoned to a dungeon for a ‘discovery’.
Due to the increase in complexity and difficulty in the dungeons, I’ve been avoiding PUGs like the plague and have been running with the Guild when possible, which surprisingly isn’t that often. The ‘regular’ versions of the dungeons (for the most part) don’t offer nearly any gear that would be upgrades and I can’t earn any reputation there, so fighting there is either practice for honing my skills or charity for guildies who haven’t hit 85 yet or need the i333 (or under) equipment.
Presently, we have few members that qualify for heroics and I’m exceedingly bad at being available when these runs start. That is changing gradually as more players become “heroic ready” by hitting that magic i329-average level and the opportunities to participate in daily runs increase in the coming weeks.
I’ll touch on each dungeon in these blog posts in the coming days and for today, you get the Throne of Tides, the first dungeon I ran in Cata.
The Throne of Tides is accessed by heading down the giant underwater whirlpool in the abyssal maw, taking you deep (DEEP) within the earth into a secret cavern. The dungeon itself is utterly beautiful with an (very no-surprises-here) aquatic theme and home to Neptulon, the unoriginally named God o’ th’ Sea. It’s an open-air environment, so there’s no swimming involved and plenty of naga, gil-goblins, murlocs, and water-elementals to keep the pace err…fluid.
The dungeon layout is fairly straight-forward and houses a very ‘nifty’ features in addition to several bosses you catch glimpses of throughout your travels in Vashj’ir. There’s a large shimmering elevator to ride, a teleporter that allows you to return to the dungeon entrance a lot faster than waiting for the elevator, and several ‘gauntlet’ hallways that constantly spawn groups of trash mobs until the paths have been cleared.
Trash follows typical Cataclysm-sized groups of five or more, making crowd control necessary for appropriately-leveled parties and the mixture of types favor mages and warlocks both.
Bosses you encounter along the way include Lady Naz’jar—a naga who periodically becomes invulnerable as she summons minions, Commander Ulthok—a fairly straightforward tank’n’spank, and my personal favorite: Erunak and the Mindbender. Erunak starts off as an Earthen Ring-lookin’ dude with a large pulsating head. After you blast him down to half health, it gets awesome. The hat is revealed to be a PSIONICALLY ENDOWED OCTOPUS who runs around alternately possessing people until they are (literally) beaten half to half, blasting the party with beams of inky darkness, and surrounding itself with a shield that heals it when damaging spells are cast.
The final encounter is a ‘defend area’ with you assisting Neptulon as he attempts to “cleanse the waters”. I’m guessing naga have been peeing in the pool. In this encounter, the party deals with waves of cultists and thingies summoned by them until Neptulon’s ritual is complete and the killer octopus who sank your boat shows up. You receive a MASSIVE health and damage buff (Strev was some 30 feet tall and critting for over 700k damage) and you must blast the cephalopod into sushi as it lurks overhead. Completing the encounter allows the party to loot a chest of Neptulon’s treasures.
Overall, I rather enjoy this dungeon. Tune in next time for Blackrock Caverns!
Due to the increase in complexity and difficulty in the dungeons, I’ve been avoiding PUGs like the plague and have been running with the Guild when possible, which surprisingly isn’t that often. The ‘regular’ versions of the dungeons (for the most part) don’t offer nearly any gear that would be upgrades and I can’t earn any reputation there, so fighting there is either practice for honing my skills or charity for guildies who haven’t hit 85 yet or need the i333 (or under) equipment.
Presently, we have few members that qualify for heroics and I’m exceedingly bad at being available when these runs start. That is changing gradually as more players become “heroic ready” by hitting that magic i329-average level and the opportunities to participate in daily runs increase in the coming weeks.
I’ll touch on each dungeon in these blog posts in the coming days and for today, you get the Throne of Tides, the first dungeon I ran in Cata.
The Throne of Tides is accessed by heading down the giant underwater whirlpool in the abyssal maw, taking you deep (DEEP) within the earth into a secret cavern. The dungeon itself is utterly beautiful with an (very no-surprises-here) aquatic theme and home to Neptulon, the unoriginally named God o’ th’ Sea. It’s an open-air environment, so there’s no swimming involved and plenty of naga, gil-goblins, murlocs, and water-elementals to keep the pace err…fluid.
The dungeon layout is fairly straight-forward and houses a very ‘nifty’ features in addition to several bosses you catch glimpses of throughout your travels in Vashj’ir. There’s a large shimmering elevator to ride, a teleporter that allows you to return to the dungeon entrance a lot faster than waiting for the elevator, and several ‘gauntlet’ hallways that constantly spawn groups of trash mobs until the paths have been cleared.
Trash follows typical Cataclysm-sized groups of five or more, making crowd control necessary for appropriately-leveled parties and the mixture of types favor mages and warlocks both.
Bosses you encounter along the way include Lady Naz’jar—a naga who periodically becomes invulnerable as she summons minions, Commander Ulthok—a fairly straightforward tank’n’spank, and my personal favorite: Erunak and the Mindbender. Erunak starts off as an Earthen Ring-lookin’ dude with a large pulsating head. After you blast him down to half health, it gets awesome. The hat is revealed to be a PSIONICALLY ENDOWED OCTOPUS who runs around alternately possessing people until they are (literally) beaten half to half, blasting the party with beams of inky darkness, and surrounding itself with a shield that heals it when damaging spells are cast.
The final encounter is a ‘defend area’ with you assisting Neptulon as he attempts to “cleanse the waters”. I’m guessing naga have been peeing in the pool. In this encounter, the party deals with waves of cultists and thingies summoned by them until Neptulon’s ritual is complete and the killer octopus who sank your boat shows up. You receive a MASSIVE health and damage buff (Strev was some 30 feet tall and critting for over 700k damage) and you must blast the cephalopod into sushi as it lurks overhead. Completing the encounter allows the party to loot a chest of Neptulon’s treasures.
Overall, I rather enjoy this dungeon. Tune in next time for Blackrock Caverns!
Friday, December 17, 2010
For Want of a Hat
Spent a couple of hours running dailies for Wildhammer (yay!) and Tol Barad (boo!), interrupted by an amusing chunk of time where the Guild managed to put together nearly two full 5-man teams for dungeons before realizing that we had no tanks.
I have some time off next week so I intend to knock out a lot of the Christmas (err.. Winter Veil) events then, but I figured since I was out and about, I’d go ahead and get a couple of the easy achievements done. Cooking a few holiday recipes was quickly handled, as was rescuing a kidnapped reindeer. After some brief confusion and some internet searches, I obtained a pocket full of mistletoe and started the “Bros before Ho ho hos”. The Greench was overcamped, so that gets to wait until the server population is down. Since many of the achieves can’t happen before the presents are available on Christmas itself, I contented myself with getting some ‘holiday clothes’ and fruitcake.
The AH had pleasantly overpriced boots for sale and some kind soul had left a wintermas robe in the guild bank, so that was covered. All I needed was a hat. After camping the AH for a bit, I went to look up the requirements to see if it was something Zyrial could make and discovered to my horror it is a bind-on-pickup item. Oh noes! The hat itself is either obtainable as a random world drop or from certain bosses, the easiest of which may be the mage in Nexus. So, alone and tired to the Nexus I flew.
Wowhead noted that the hat doesn’t drop 100% from the ‘regular’ version, it had to be Heroic. Fine. We’d see how I do soloing a LK heroic. I stepped in and the mobs are level 81 elites. Fortunately, the spawns are for the most part not densely packed. I meandered up to the first dragonkin and reduced it to slag. This was promising. I repeated my success and in short order I was by the Hall of Suddenly Mobile Captain America Wannabes. The guide I had read noted they wouldn’t attack if you stayed out of melee range. A patrol consisting of a guy with two dogs and a larger aggro radius than expected approached. Not good. I made my decision and ran as the pack descended on me, weaving as I could to avoid the frozen foes with the intention of turning invisible to drop aggro once I was in the clear. What I had neglected to take into consideration was that the guide was written for the non-heroic version of the dungeon.
As I ran, ice exploded all around me and over a dozen and a half critters took me down fast. Terrific. I returned to the dungeon and opted to take a different path to my quarry and went over a couple of floating platforms taking groups of three on with judicious use of invisibility to sneak past a rather large clump of potential hurt and mirror image against patrols. In short order, I faced Mage What’s-her-Name. She was wearing a hat and—oh, LOOK! Under 225k health? Cake!
Burning my cool downs, I lit into her like a cat aflame and in less than seven seconds I had her at half…and things turned ugly. She “split” into 3 copies and lit up my world. I couldn’t make progress against the boss’ health until the three were burned down, but Time Warp was still active and it helped as I blasted my heart out. Once the three were down, I had a very brief respite to evocate some health and mana back. The boss again presented herself, but I was only given a few seconds to nuke her down to 50k or so before she split again. This time, tired and ragged from the fight I could only best two of the clones before tasting sweet, sweet floor.
I had only a few minutes before turning into a pumpkin, so I tried the dungeon again on ‘normal’ difficulty. Facing level 71 elites were substantially less threatening. This time Miss Thing bit pavement in five seconds flat, but despite her festive appearance, there was no hat to be had. Slightly saddened, I logged out. I’ll try again another time.
I have some time off next week so I intend to knock out a lot of the Christmas (err.. Winter Veil) events then, but I figured since I was out and about, I’d go ahead and get a couple of the easy achievements done. Cooking a few holiday recipes was quickly handled, as was rescuing a kidnapped reindeer. After some brief confusion and some internet searches, I obtained a pocket full of mistletoe and started the “Bros before Ho ho hos”. The Greench was overcamped, so that gets to wait until the server population is down. Since many of the achieves can’t happen before the presents are available on Christmas itself, I contented myself with getting some ‘holiday clothes’ and fruitcake.
The AH had pleasantly overpriced boots for sale and some kind soul had left a wintermas robe in the guild bank, so that was covered. All I needed was a hat. After camping the AH for a bit, I went to look up the requirements to see if it was something Zyrial could make and discovered to my horror it is a bind-on-pickup item. Oh noes! The hat itself is either obtainable as a random world drop or from certain bosses, the easiest of which may be the mage in Nexus. So, alone and tired to the Nexus I flew.
Wowhead noted that the hat doesn’t drop 100% from the ‘regular’ version, it had to be Heroic. Fine. We’d see how I do soloing a LK heroic. I stepped in and the mobs are level 81 elites. Fortunately, the spawns are for the most part not densely packed. I meandered up to the first dragonkin and reduced it to slag. This was promising. I repeated my success and in short order I was by the Hall of Suddenly Mobile Captain America Wannabes. The guide I had read noted they wouldn’t attack if you stayed out of melee range. A patrol consisting of a guy with two dogs and a larger aggro radius than expected approached. Not good. I made my decision and ran as the pack descended on me, weaving as I could to avoid the frozen foes with the intention of turning invisible to drop aggro once I was in the clear. What I had neglected to take into consideration was that the guide was written for the non-heroic version of the dungeon.
As I ran, ice exploded all around me and over a dozen and a half critters took me down fast. Terrific. I returned to the dungeon and opted to take a different path to my quarry and went over a couple of floating platforms taking groups of three on with judicious use of invisibility to sneak past a rather large clump of potential hurt and mirror image against patrols. In short order, I faced Mage What’s-her-Name. She was wearing a hat and—oh, LOOK! Under 225k health? Cake!
Burning my cool downs, I lit into her like a cat aflame and in less than seven seconds I had her at half…and things turned ugly. She “split” into 3 copies and lit up my world. I couldn’t make progress against the boss’ health until the three were burned down, but Time Warp was still active and it helped as I blasted my heart out. Once the three were down, I had a very brief respite to evocate some health and mana back. The boss again presented herself, but I was only given a few seconds to nuke her down to 50k or so before she split again. This time, tired and ragged from the fight I could only best two of the clones before tasting sweet, sweet floor.
I had only a few minutes before turning into a pumpkin, so I tried the dungeon again on ‘normal’ difficulty. Facing level 71 elites were substantially less threatening. This time Miss Thing bit pavement in five seconds flat, but despite her festive appearance, there was no hat to be had. Slightly saddened, I logged out. I’ll try again another time.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Cataclysmic Edition Part 2: The Zone Ranger
After playing around this past week and finishing all of the quests in all of the new cata zones except Vashj’ir, I feel ‘somewhat qualified’ to give my opinion on the highs and lows that are out there. The bottom line is that Blizzard went all out to provide the McDLT of MMOs. Readers who have no idea what a McDLT is should go ask their parents now or more likely just wiki it. Go ahead. I’ll be here when you get back.
For a MMO, it’s a rather curious dichotomy. The hot side (hard core raider EXTREME!) and cool side (the casuals) can both find entertainment in abundance, but there’s a very obvious divider between the two.
On the cool side, there’s thousands of new quests that are all designed to be completed in ten minutes or less. Not much time? That’s ok. Pick it up, play with it, put it down, and walk away. These emphasize ‘fun’ over ‘immersion’ with a large number of quests that are nothing but blatant nods to popular culture. That’s not to say they aren’t good—but there’s an obvious shift from the Vanilla way of thinking that required hours of time invested and trips across the continents to find the Magic McGuffin or collect plot coupons. The only really negative thing I can say about them is that there’s little to no difficulty at all and in a way it cheapens the victory. Gone are the “recommended group size: [3-5]” quests. If a quest has you fighting an elite, there –will- be a way to weaken it to normal levels or there will be NPC intervention to assist. Aside from 2 deaths to Barron Geddon in Hyjal before I “got it” and “swallowed by giant worm” in Deepholm, the only deaths I took exploring the entirity of That Which is Not Tol Barad (see later) were due to random disconnects and server crashes. The only ‘must group for’ quests are some dailies in Tol Barad and the Crucible of Carnage arena fights in Twilight Highlands.
The dungeons are where it starts to get challenging. I’ve been actively avoiding PUGs this expansion due to extensive queue times (up to an hour), but even with guild runs they aren’t a simple blaze through everything, gather half a room and nuke it to death with AoEs. Crowd control is –necessary- and welcome. It isn’t unusual to see ‘sheep pulling’ now, where the mage pulls a group with polymorph and the tank picks up the aggro from the incoming pack as the mage scurries to a corner. This is where the wheat begins being separated from the chaff and communication skills become vital.
On the hot side, you have heroics and raids—mobs hit for quantities that are nothing less than obscene, but the rewards are the highest available pve gear. Not to be left out in the cold, the pvpers now have rated battlegrounds—and good scores there AND arenas are required for top tier pvp gear. The latter has the interesting side effect of making ‘normal’ BGs a smidgeon more friendly to casuals. (but just a smidgeon. You still find a much higher mouthy asshole to skilled player ratio in any BG compared to the rest of the game.) I’ll share the story of the Guild’s First Cataclysm Raid some other time.
Any way you go, something for everyone.
Now, as far as the zones themselves, each zone has an entertaining “introduction” that is a once ever movie and/or phased event that starts the player into the main quest theme. Each zone has one central storyline with several converging story arcs that held my interest to the point where I finished all of a zone’s quests long after I had gotten the loremaster ‘completion’ achieve for each particular zone. They are well-written and very compelling with elaborate cutscenes and movies aplenty.
In deference to players who haven’t blazed through the content, I’ll go against my usual style and keep spoilers to a minimum.
Mount Hyjal — I honestly didn’t think that much of the area at first. It’s mostly a foresty/mountainous (shock!) zone and it is the only place I’d seen that required a player to explore a little to find quest givers. The overall arc introduces the player to the Twilight Hammer (the ‘bad guys’ of the expansion that you face in every zone) and involves the player in rescuing, aiding, and assisting druids in returning the animal gods to Azeroth. I really got into the zone after I came back after doing all of the others. Zone Highlights: the Joust homage, chucking bear cubs from a tree top to a trampoline, and giving a speech to inspire graduating Twilight Cultists.
Vashj’ir — From the moment I was shipwrecked by a giant octopus, I fell in love with this lush and beautiful underwater zone. Within a few quests you’ll get the ability to breathe water and later on you’ll get a seahorse steed so you can finally live out those Aquaman fantasy scenes you’ve harbored your entire life. The biggest highlights are the naga quest lines where you possess the body of an ancient naga battlemaiden and explore the zone’s lore firsthand.
Deepholm — Possibly my least favorite zone. The entire zone is one ginormous cavern which vaguely reminds me of Icecrown in a ‘large, uninteresting’ features sort of way. There’s a plethora of dailies that unlock eventually and the lavascale catfish swim bountifully here, so I keep going back regardless of my distaste. The main plot arc is repairing the “World Pillar” which was broken into three convenient chunks when Deathwing escaped.
Uldum – Far and away, this zone is my favorite. Ever since Vanilla when I saw those massive gates in Tanaris, I wondered what lay past them. Now six years later they have opened into an Egyptian wonderland. Those who followed my previous “Blog in the Desert” know I have an unhealthy love affair with this sub-genre and it pandered to every pore in my body. Camel mounts? Amusing quests? Dozens of quests that involve Harrison Jones, famed archaeologist? Over a dozen movies and cut scenes? The only hate I have here is for some buggy and poorly implemented phasing that will hopefully be fixed within a month. Main plotlines are the Harrison Jones lines (which are exactly as awesome as you expect, constantly upping itself on “epicosity” until one runs out of superlatives) and a war between factions of catlike centaurs and the Twilight Hammer.
Twilight Highlands – I started out disliking this dimly-lit foresty zone, mostly because it starts out in a battlefield a la Borean Tundra, but quickly turned into my second favorite once I met the Wildhammer dwarves. Rife with humor and amusing quests the dwarves kept me going until I quickly became drawn into the Alliance’s last stand against the Twilight Hammer, at one point standing toe to toe with SI:7’s Mathias Shaw as we did what had to be done. Highlight? “The wedding.”
Tol Barad – This zone has a level 85 requirement to enter and it’s necessary. There’s actually two parts to the zone: Tol Barad Peninsula and Tol Barad itself. Each have a number of daily quests and serve up vast amounts of pain. The mobs spawn at ungodly rates and deal massive amounts of damage quickly. Add to that the zones are flight restricted and you have all the makings of mage pancakes. I don’t have an issue with the difficulty of the zone—it’s nice to have a challenge while killing rats, I just wish the respawn rates were a bit more…normalized. The daily quests seem to cycle through a small variety so it isn’t the same ten rats day after day. Also, the quest rewards give ‘commendations’, a zone-wide currency used in conjunction with reputation to acquire nifty epic weaponry and toys.
That’s cata in a nutshell. Join me next time for Cataclysm Edition Part 3: Dungeon Diving
For a MMO, it’s a rather curious dichotomy. The hot side (hard core raider EXTREME!) and cool side (the casuals) can both find entertainment in abundance, but there’s a very obvious divider between the two.
On the cool side, there’s thousands of new quests that are all designed to be completed in ten minutes or less. Not much time? That’s ok. Pick it up, play with it, put it down, and walk away. These emphasize ‘fun’ over ‘immersion’ with a large number of quests that are nothing but blatant nods to popular culture. That’s not to say they aren’t good—but there’s an obvious shift from the Vanilla way of thinking that required hours of time invested and trips across the continents to find the Magic McGuffin or collect plot coupons. The only really negative thing I can say about them is that there’s little to no difficulty at all and in a way it cheapens the victory. Gone are the “recommended group size: [3-5]” quests. If a quest has you fighting an elite, there –will- be a way to weaken it to normal levels or there will be NPC intervention to assist. Aside from 2 deaths to Barron Geddon in Hyjal before I “got it” and “swallowed by giant worm” in Deepholm, the only deaths I took exploring the entirity of That Which is Not Tol Barad (see later) were due to random disconnects and server crashes. The only ‘must group for’ quests are some dailies in Tol Barad and the Crucible of Carnage arena fights in Twilight Highlands.
The dungeons are where it starts to get challenging. I’ve been actively avoiding PUGs this expansion due to extensive queue times (up to an hour), but even with guild runs they aren’t a simple blaze through everything, gather half a room and nuke it to death with AoEs. Crowd control is –necessary- and welcome. It isn’t unusual to see ‘sheep pulling’ now, where the mage pulls a group with polymorph and the tank picks up the aggro from the incoming pack as the mage scurries to a corner. This is where the wheat begins being separated from the chaff and communication skills become vital.
On the hot side, you have heroics and raids—mobs hit for quantities that are nothing less than obscene, but the rewards are the highest available pve gear. Not to be left out in the cold, the pvpers now have rated battlegrounds—and good scores there AND arenas are required for top tier pvp gear. The latter has the interesting side effect of making ‘normal’ BGs a smidgeon more friendly to casuals. (but just a smidgeon. You still find a much higher mouthy asshole to skilled player ratio in any BG compared to the rest of the game.) I’ll share the story of the Guild’s First Cataclysm Raid some other time.
Any way you go, something for everyone.
Now, as far as the zones themselves, each zone has an entertaining “introduction” that is a once ever movie and/or phased event that starts the player into the main quest theme. Each zone has one central storyline with several converging story arcs that held my interest to the point where I finished all of a zone’s quests long after I had gotten the loremaster ‘completion’ achieve for each particular zone. They are well-written and very compelling with elaborate cutscenes and movies aplenty.
In deference to players who haven’t blazed through the content, I’ll go against my usual style and keep spoilers to a minimum.
Mount Hyjal — I honestly didn’t think that much of the area at first. It’s mostly a foresty/mountainous (shock!) zone and it is the only place I’d seen that required a player to explore a little to find quest givers. The overall arc introduces the player to the Twilight Hammer (the ‘bad guys’ of the expansion that you face in every zone) and involves the player in rescuing, aiding, and assisting druids in returning the animal gods to Azeroth. I really got into the zone after I came back after doing all of the others. Zone Highlights: the Joust homage, chucking bear cubs from a tree top to a trampoline, and giving a speech to inspire graduating Twilight Cultists.
Vashj’ir — From the moment I was shipwrecked by a giant octopus, I fell in love with this lush and beautiful underwater zone. Within a few quests you’ll get the ability to breathe water and later on you’ll get a seahorse steed so you can finally live out those Aquaman fantasy scenes you’ve harbored your entire life. The biggest highlights are the naga quest lines where you possess the body of an ancient naga battlemaiden and explore the zone’s lore firsthand.
Deepholm — Possibly my least favorite zone. The entire zone is one ginormous cavern which vaguely reminds me of Icecrown in a ‘large, uninteresting’ features sort of way. There’s a plethora of dailies that unlock eventually and the lavascale catfish swim bountifully here, so I keep going back regardless of my distaste. The main plot arc is repairing the “World Pillar” which was broken into three convenient chunks when Deathwing escaped.
Uldum – Far and away, this zone is my favorite. Ever since Vanilla when I saw those massive gates in Tanaris, I wondered what lay past them. Now six years later they have opened into an Egyptian wonderland. Those who followed my previous “Blog in the Desert” know I have an unhealthy love affair with this sub-genre and it pandered to every pore in my body. Camel mounts? Amusing quests? Dozens of quests that involve Harrison Jones, famed archaeologist? Over a dozen movies and cut scenes? The only hate I have here is for some buggy and poorly implemented phasing that will hopefully be fixed within a month. Main plotlines are the Harrison Jones lines (which are exactly as awesome as you expect, constantly upping itself on “epicosity” until one runs out of superlatives) and a war between factions of catlike centaurs and the Twilight Hammer.
Twilight Highlands – I started out disliking this dimly-lit foresty zone, mostly because it starts out in a battlefield a la Borean Tundra, but quickly turned into my second favorite once I met the Wildhammer dwarves. Rife with humor and amusing quests the dwarves kept me going until I quickly became drawn into the Alliance’s last stand against the Twilight Hammer, at one point standing toe to toe with SI:7’s Mathias Shaw as we did what had to be done. Highlight? “The wedding.”
Tol Barad – This zone has a level 85 requirement to enter and it’s necessary. There’s actually two parts to the zone: Tol Barad Peninsula and Tol Barad itself. Each have a number of daily quests and serve up vast amounts of pain. The mobs spawn at ungodly rates and deal massive amounts of damage quickly. Add to that the zones are flight restricted and you have all the makings of mage pancakes. I don’t have an issue with the difficulty of the zone—it’s nice to have a challenge while killing rats, I just wish the respawn rates were a bit more…normalized. The daily quests seem to cycle through a small variety so it isn’t the same ten rats day after day. Also, the quest rewards give ‘commendations’, a zone-wide currency used in conjunction with reputation to acquire nifty epic weaponry and toys.
That’s cata in a nutshell. Join me next time for Cataclysm Edition Part 3: Dungeon Diving
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Cataclysmic Edition Part 1: It’s the Economy, Stupid
Over the course of the next couple of weeks, I’ll be going over my impressions of the latest expansion pack to hit the shelves. Kick back and enjoy… everything old is new again.
The cataclysm has come and the very bedrock of the world (of warcraft) has been shattered: the economy. In the first day or two after the expansion went live, the auction house was rocked by massive selloffs of Lich King supplies and an absolute feeding frenzy by people rushing to level up crafting professions to new heights or get whatever advantage they could in the Great Race to 85. For months max level players had been stockpiling gold for release and now it all was being spent in an orgy of unbridled consumption.
The second biggest winners were the gatherers who fed the mobs what they wanted at prices that were nothing less than astronomical. ‘New dust’ was trading at up to 100g each and stocks of herb, skins, and enchanting materials disappearing of the shelves as fast as they were posted. The biggest winners? Those with the capital to corner the market on the horrifically overpriced goods and resell them at rates that would make Midas blush with shame. Lacking the initial capital to be a true robber baron, I bought and sold what I could. The free market was a maelstrom I intended to weather.
Starting with 4k coin-- not a trivial amount, I realize, I disenchanted nearly every quest reward I could find and skinned anything with a pulse. The hardest part was resisting the temptation to post ‘the lowest price’ for quick sales. Hour after hour my fortunes grew and within a day I was sitting at four times my starting capital.
It’s now been a week after Cataclysm launched and I’m sitting at a very comfortable 13k in the bank…after spending 22k leveling Enchanting up to max and spending a couple thousand on pets and mounts because I could. All total I beat out the “capped by cata” gold blogger by a smooth 3k. I’d call that a ‘win’.
Material prices will fall in about a week or so, but I’ve liquidated my ‘excess’ materials at this point, so I won’t be left holding the proverbial bag.
So, where to go from here? Time to get my fishing up—there’s still an incredibly large demand for certain fish (lavascale in particular) and most would rather do anything but fish. Combine that with the level of fishing required to succeed anywhere except pools in the new areas and you’ve got profit potential.
Tomorrow: The Zone Ranger
The cataclysm has come and the very bedrock of the world (of warcraft) has been shattered: the economy. In the first day or two after the expansion went live, the auction house was rocked by massive selloffs of Lich King supplies and an absolute feeding frenzy by people rushing to level up crafting professions to new heights or get whatever advantage they could in the Great Race to 85. For months max level players had been stockpiling gold for release and now it all was being spent in an orgy of unbridled consumption.
The second biggest winners were the gatherers who fed the mobs what they wanted at prices that were nothing less than astronomical. ‘New dust’ was trading at up to 100g each and stocks of herb, skins, and enchanting materials disappearing of the shelves as fast as they were posted. The biggest winners? Those with the capital to corner the market on the horrifically overpriced goods and resell them at rates that would make Midas blush with shame. Lacking the initial capital to be a true robber baron, I bought and sold what I could. The free market was a maelstrom I intended to weather.
Starting with 4k coin-- not a trivial amount, I realize, I disenchanted nearly every quest reward I could find and skinned anything with a pulse. The hardest part was resisting the temptation to post ‘the lowest price’ for quick sales. Hour after hour my fortunes grew and within a day I was sitting at four times my starting capital.
It’s now been a week after Cataclysm launched and I’m sitting at a very comfortable 13k in the bank…after spending 22k leveling Enchanting up to max and spending a couple thousand on pets and mounts because I could. All total I beat out the “capped by cata” gold blogger by a smooth 3k. I’d call that a ‘win’.
Material prices will fall in about a week or so, but I’ve liquidated my ‘excess’ materials at this point, so I won’t be left holding the proverbial bag.
So, where to go from here? Time to get my fishing up—there’s still an incredibly large demand for certain fish (lavascale in particular) and most would rather do anything but fish. Combine that with the level of fishing required to succeed anywhere except pools in the new areas and you’ve got profit potential.
Tomorrow: The Zone Ranger
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